HP Boosts 3PAR Storage With All-SSD Option

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Hewlett-Packard this week offered new SSD configurations for its 3PAR P10000 storage array, including an all-SSD option and a doubling of the maximum number of SSDs that can be used alongside spinning disks.

The company also introduced a new SSD-based cache offering for its ProLiant servers that can be extended to the SSDs inside a 3PAR array.

"Customers can either choose all SSDs, or a mix of SSD and spinning disk," Mulchand said. "For applications requiring high performance with relatively low capacity, they can trade capacity for performance."

The 3PAR P10000 can now be configured with up to 128 SSDs per node pair, or a maximum of 512 SSDs, Mulchand said. Prior to this week, the P10000 could be configured with up to 32 SSDs per controller pair, or a maximum of 128 SSDs.

Total capacity for the 3PAR P10000 is a maximum of 1,092 drives, including spinning disks and SSDs. However, a maximum of 512 SSDs is set because more than that would saturate the controller's performance, he said.

Dhruv Gulati, executive vice president of Lilien Systems, a Larkspur, Calif.-based solution provider and long-term HP partner, said the new SSD configurations for the HP 3PAR P10000 array should result in impressive performance, although it may not be obvious where such performance is required.

"I'm not sure what the use case will be," Gulati said. "An all-SSD array will be very expensive. But, maybe it can be used with ProLiant servers to create an appliance that can compete with Oracle's Exadata or IBM's Netezza."

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